The treatment of cancer diseases is of great importance in medicine. There is a worldwide need for effective cancer therapies in order to achieve a treatment which is appropriate to a patient and is target-orientated. This can be seen in the large number of scientific studies which have recently appeared in the fields of applied oncology and fundamental research relating to cancer therapy.
The effects of tumor inhibitors are due to a very wide variety of mechanisms, only some of which are known. It is not unusual for known tumor drugs to be found to have new mechanisms of action. This is also to be expected in the case of the compounds according to the invention. Many tumor drugs act by way of mechanisms such as blockading the mechanism of cell division in the cell, preventing the tumor from being supplied with nutrients and oxygen (antiangiogenesis), preventing metastasis, preventing the reception and the onward transmission of growth signals to the tumor cell or forcing the tumor cell into programmed cell death (apoptosis).
Because they have different mechanisms of action, including interacting with different intracellular targets, the clinically relevant cytostatic agents are frequently administered in combination in order to achieve a synergistic therapeutic effect.
Delarge, J. and Ghys, A., Ann. Pharm. Fr. 41 (1983) 55-60, describes some 4-phenylthiopyridine-3-sulfonamides with hypolipemic properties. U.S. Pat. No. 4,018,929 relates to pyridinesulfonamides as inflammation inhibitors and diuretics. Owa, T., et al., Bioorg. Med. Chem. Lett. 12 (2002) 2097-2100 relates to N-(7-indolyl)-3-pyridinesulfonamide derivatives as antitumor agents.
WO 2003/035629 relates to thiophene- and thiazolesulfonamides as antineoplastic agents. WO 02/098848 and WO 2004/048329 relate to benzoylsulfonamides as antitumor agents.